"Alison Lurie, the Pulitzer Prize - winning novelist, is our savvy guide and interpreter on this tour through the history of fashion, providing unique insights into how changing sex roles, political upheavals, and class structure have influenced costume.
Whether she is describing the enormous amount of clothing worm by early Victorian women or illuminating the significance of the long robes worn throughout the centuries by again men to connote eminence, her analysis is playful, clever, and always on target." "This edition of a work long considered a classic features a new introduction by Alison Lurie that examines the state of fashion today."--BOOK JACKET.
Previews available in: English
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Includes bibliographical references (p. [265]-266).
"An Owl book."
Originally published: New York : Random House, c1981. With new introd.
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In this exhaustive and entertaining study, Alison Lurie shows what the clothes we choose to wear say about us. Approaching clothing from four perspectives -- historical, social logical, psychological, anthropological -- she demonstrates how color, fabric and cut are not mere whims of designers or manufacturers but constitute a vocabulary and grammar as precise and full of subconscious intent as any verbal language: how our clothes announce our sex, age and class and often give important information (or misinformation) about our occupation, geographical origin, personality, opinions, tastes, sexual desires and current mood. - Back cover.
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{{cite book|author=Alison Lurie |date=2000 |title=The language of clothes |url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780805062441 |publication-place=New York |publisher=Henry Holt |isbn=0-8050-6244-0 |lccn=99041520 |oclc=41991425 |ol=45103M}}